Your Warm and Tender Love (2019 Remaster)

We delve back into Steve Alton's world in a sister series to Meg. This time, Alton tries to create a brand new genre, the historical sci-fi thriller. Does he succeed? Is this book worth your time? To start, Jonas Taylor and the Megalodons are not in this book. The new hero of the book is a Scottish marine biologist named Zachary Wallace, born in the Highlands and raised in America. After a career-ending accident in the Sargasso Sea leaves him destitute, he gets a desperate call from his estranged father back in Scotland, asking for his help. It seems that Angus Wallace has been accused of murdering a business partner. His defense is that he didn't murder the guy, the Loch Ness Monster did, and now he needs Zach to prove that Nessie exists. The premise is a bit simplistic in its execution. Where someone like Dan Brown might pour into their research to make the plot sound at least feasible, Alton is able to do whatever he wants as he goes, but he still tries to put a historical edge on things. Interwoven within a few chapters are some diary entries from Adam Wallace, Zach's ancestor, who served as a Knight Templar. He had to escape to Scotland after the Friday the 13th massacre of the Templars, where he encountered the Loch Ness Monster as well. While these scenes do fill in the world a little bit, they're so detached from the main plot that they almost serve as filler. I won't say that the Templar angle was completely useless, since it does tie back into the story in the end, but only loosely. It was like they were added on artificially in order to meet the criteria for this to be a historical science fiction thriller. Sometimes it's not worth the added baggage, and you just need to trim the fat for the sake of the story at large. You want historical sci-fi? Templars vs. Aliens. There, now someone else can write that and have the history angle stay relevant. While I do enjoy the Meg books as guilty pleasures, because they're well-written thrillers that trigger my thalassophobia, the Loch is not as well structured. Things are put into place just to move Zach around, then leave despite any kind of buildup. Once the trial starts, we get a few drawn-out scenes of questions and answers on the stand, and then the trial gets more or less dropped so Zach can focus on his old friends from Scotland. Then, after meeting a few friends, they get pushed aside so he can focus on looking into the monster. Hell, Zach even has a fiancée who leaves him just to add to his misery, but she serves no purpose beyond that. There are several plot elements that are tacked on just to add to the word count, which just artificially adds to the plot. It doesn't really feel authentic. It's like Alton had a few good ideas for a story about the Loch Ness monster, then clumsily assembled a book around it. It's not awful, but it is sloppy. At least his protagonist isn't bad. Zach Wallace is a naturally inquisitive person who begins investigating Loch Ness in spite of his father. He actually hates his father for being a complete womanizer, and because of an incident in which Zach nearly drowned in the loch when he was nine. Zach gets drawn in because of a string of recent deaths around the lake, very violent ones, like one crime scene which is described as, someone having thrown buckets of red paint everywhere. He also has this odd left-brain, right-brain talk that he discusses with himself, which is a little quirky, but it isn't too distracting. He's smart, logical, and has a degree of pride as a scientist, and isn't too keen on investigating the loch until a string of coincidences convince him to. Along the way, we also meet Zach's childhood friend Finley, True McDonald, and his old crush, Brandy. True is a large Scottish man, very brash, quick to anger, but also very loyal to his friends. If you think of The Scotsman from Samurai Jack, you basically have an idea of who True is. Brandy is another story, though, and she kind of helps cement my thoughts on Alton's writing style towards women. When Zach first arrived in Scotland, he was in a deep depression, so True sent him to Brandy for a little stress relief. In other words, to get laid, which Brandy was happy to accommodate him with. These people haven't seen each other in 17 years and didn't stay in real contact all that time, but Brandy was ready to jump into bed with him after a brief hello. Now, I'm not trying to say Alton is a misogynist or anything, I just think that he needs to rethink his female characters. Aside from that, a lot of his wife characters in other books come off as entitled bitches, so I'm thinking he has some bad experiences with marriage. And since Brandy kind of gets a little bitchy in this book's sequel, I might be right, but that's for another review. One strength that Alton definitely has, though, is his ability to create random side characters and flesh them out in only a few pages. He then puts them in danger of the monster, and it's genuinely thrilling to see him try to survive an attack. Since you don't know who will make it out alive or not, it's easy to get sucked into the story, at least in these smaller sections. The thrills are also good when they finally appear, but they take a long while to set up. After the initial Sargasso Sea disaster in the first few chapters, you have to make it through more than a third of the book before you get any more action. The most exciting thing between these events is some courtroom melodrama, and while I know nothing of Scottish courtroom procedure, I think Alton bungled the court scenes. There was just too much cramped in to sound organic, something which John Grisham could do in his sleep. Overall, The Lock was kind of mad. Some people might like it, but I'm not one of them. The things that are good are great, but they're used too sparingly to support the rest of the story. The book doesn't have any major flaws, but it does drag a little. But at least it's not as out there as the sequel, Vostok. Stay tuned for that one next week. So, if you read the book, what did you think? If not, do you want to read it now? Whatever your thoughts, comment below and stay tuned for more.